Will America Fall Prey To A British Disease?

Barry Eichengreen looks back at an exhausted post-WWII Britain and sees a lesson for the US today:

[Britain] failed to develop a coherent policy response to the financial crisis of the 1930’s. Its political parties, rather than working together to address pressing economic problems, remained at each other’s throats. The country turned inward. Its politics grew fractious, its policies erratic, and its finances increasingly unstable.

In short, Britain’s was a political, not an economic, failure. And that history, unfortunately, is all too pertinent to America’s fate.